Pomona College Museum of Art
is pleased to announce the opening of It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of
Los Angeles 1969-1973: Part 2: Helene Winer at Pomona, on view December 3, 2010, through February 19, 2012. The show is focused on groundbreaking curatorial
programs at the Museum from 1970-1972 and is part of the Pacific Standard Time
collaboration among 60 Southern California institutions; Part 1: Hal Glicksman was widely
praised by the mainstream and art media.

The public reception for “Part 2: Helene Winer at Pomona” will be on Saturday,
December 3, 2011 from 5 to 7 p.m. A press preview will be held Saturday,
December 3, 2011, from 3 to 5 p.m. An artist conversation, moderated by Helene
Winer with artists in the exhibition including John Baldessari, William
Leavitt, and Allen Ruppersberg, will be held on Sunday, February 19, 2012, at 3
p.m. in Pomona College’s Rose Hills Theater. All events are free and open to
the public.

“Part 2: Helene Winer at Pomona” focuses on the cutting edge curatorial
programs that Winer presented as gallery director and curator at the Pomona
College Museum of Art from the fall of 1970 through the spring of 1972. During
this time, Winer organized exhibitions of Bas Jan Ader, John Baldessari, Ger
van Elk, Jack Goldstein, Joe Goode, William Leavitt, John McCracken, Ed Moses,
Allen Ruppersberg, and William Wegman. She also presented performance work by
artists such as Chris Burden (’69), Hirokazu Kosaka, Wolfgang Stoerchle, and
John White. Winer gave Goldstein and Wegman their first solo exhibitions,
provided significant early exposure for Ader, Ruppersberg, Leavitt, van Elk,
and Stoerchle, and offered exhibitions to established Los Angeles artists such
as Goode, McCracken, and Moses.

Building on the insights suggested in “Part 1: Hal Glicksman at Pomona,” the
exhibition “Part 2: Helene Winer at Pomona” demonstrates how concerns with
perception and phenomenology intersect with and develop differently in the
post-conceptual work of a group of Southern California artists working in the
early seventies. Whereas Glicksman focused on artists who were producing
phenomenologically-oriented abstract sculptures and environments, Winer
championed a group of artists who were channeling the experiential qualities of
minimalist and post-minimalist sculpture into performance art, video, and, most
significantly, conceptual photography featuring staged scenarios, realistic
environments, and innovative, often wryly humorous, uses of language. This
transition has been specifically associated with the appropriation artists of
the later 1970s, active in New York and often referred to as “The Pictures
Generation.”

“Part 2: Helene Winer at Pomona” demonstrates the crucial link between Southern
California artists in the early 1970s and the theoretically-informed
investigations of postmodernism that would follow in New York and elsewhere.
The exhibition documents Winer’s curatorial vision and her recognition of a
uniquely Southern California interpretation of post-minimalism and
post-Conceptualism that would alter the course of art history.

The influence of John Baldessari on the development of appropriation art in New
York has been well documented; however, rarely is this influence explored in
depth and across the horizon of the Southern California landscape. In fact, as
Baldessari has acknowledged (in Richard Hertz’s Jack Goldstein and the CalArts
Mafia), he regularly took his CalArts students on the 60-mile journey from
Valencia to Claremont to see the exhibitions that Helene Winer curated at
Pomona College: “she would show work no one else was interested in.” This
exhibition includes two early works by Baldessari, including Evidence: A
Potential Print (1970), which scatters, in a corner, ashes from Baldessari’s
1970 Cremation Project (a work in which he burned all of his paintings made
before 1966 in a mortuary crematorium).

Another highlight of “Part 2” will be the re-creation of two important early
sculptures by Jack Goldstein. For his 1971 solo exhibition at Pomona, Goldstein
exhibited a series of geometric constructions using large wooden blocks, nails,
glass, and photographic paper. The current exhibition will re-create two
of Goldstein’s early sculptures—freestanding wooden constructions stacked
precariously high which in their potential threat of collapse elicit physical
responses in the viewer. While these sculptures have been all but forgotten, by
Goldstein’s own testimony they were instrumental in shaping his approach to his
films, which are seen as a cornerstone of the Pictures Generation. Goldstein’s
sculptures illustrate how compositional forms can allude to images that do not
necessarily appear in their material expressions, but through subtle references
become images in the minds of viewers.

“Part 2” will also include major works from Winer’s exhibitions of Bas Jan
Ader, Ger Van Elk, William Leavitt, Allen Ruppersberg, and William Wegman,
which were among the earliest exhibitions of significant work by these artists.
The exhibition will bring together pieces which have rarely or never been
exhibited since their creation, and works that have not been exhibited together
since their original presentations at Pomona. This will include Bas Jan Ader’s
monumental two-screen slide projection work Untitled (Sweden), which has not
been exhibited in the United States since its first presentation in 1971 at
Pomona. The exhibition also includes Leavitt’s seminal California Patio and
Ruppersberg’s conceptual masterwork Where’s Al?, both of which were shown for
the first time at Pomona.

In addition to her focus on the newest directions in conceptual art, Winer also
intermittently programmed shows by a slightly older generation of leading Los
Angeles artists, often exhibiting works that were unusual within the artists’
bodies of work. “Part 2” will include works from Joe Goode, John
McCracken, and Ed Moses, including a rare wall-hanging plank by McCracken, a
staircase sculpture by Goode, and a resin painting by Moses. Winer’s interest
in performance art will be represented by documentation of projects by Chris
Burden, Hirokazu Kosaka, Wolfgang Stoerchle, and John White, including a never-before
screened fragment from the controversial performance by Wolfgang Stoerchle’s
that was long rumored to be the reason for Winer’s departure from Pomona in
1972.

“Part 2: Helene Winer at Pomona” will be supplemented by the January 21, 2012
“Performance at Pomona” as part of the Pacific Standard Time Performance and
Public Art Festival. “Performance at Pomona” consists of a series of three
performance pieces by artists represented in each of the three segments of the
exhibition. John White will represent “Part 2” with the recreation of the 1971
performance Preparation F, involving the Pomona College football team. Also
included are A Butterfly for Pomona, a new pyrotechnic performance by Judy
Chicago, based on her Atmosphere performances of the early 1970s, and Burning
Bridges, a recreation of James Turrell's 1971 flare performance. Please see
www.pomona.edu/museum to confirm
exact schedule and locations.

The catalogue for the exhibition It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los
Angeles 1969-1973 chronicles the activities of artists, scholars, students, and
faculty associated with the College during this period. The first exploration
of a creative hotbed of 1960s and 1970s Southern California art, it provides
new insight into the relationship between post-minimalism, Light and Space art
and various strands of Conceptual art, performance art and photography in
Southern California, while contributing substantial new information about
interconnections between artistic developments in Los Angeles and New York.
Featuring scholarly essays by Thomas Crow, Rebecca McGrew, Glenn Phillips
and Marie Shurkus, new interviews with Hal Glicksman and Helene Winer, archival
reprints, and eighteen new interviews with artists of the era, the book
contains 280 images, many never before seen. The catalogue is available for
purchase for $49.95 through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers and Artbook.com.

Support for the It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973
exhibitions, publication, and programming generously provided by the Getty
Foundation.

About It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-1973

From 1969 to 1973, a series of radical art projects took place at the far
eastern edge of Los Angeles County at the Pomona College Museum of Art. Here,
Hal Glicksman, a pioneering curator of Light and Space art, and Helene Winer,
later the director of Artists Space and Metro Pictures in New York, curated
landmark exhibitions by young local artists who bridged the gap between
Conceptual art and post-minimalism, and presaged the development of
postmodernism in the later 1970s. Artists such as Michael Asher, Lewis Baltz,
Jack Goldstein, and Allen Ruppersberg, among others, formed the educational
backdrop for a generation of artists who spent their formative years at Pomona
College, including alumni Mowry Baden, Chris Burden, and James Turrell

Providing unprecedented and revelatory insight into the art history of postwar
Los Angeles, the project It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles
1969-1973 consists of three distinct, but related, exhibitions curated by
Rebecca McGrew and Glenn Phillips—“Part 1: Hal Glicksman at Pomona” on view
August 30 to November 6, 2011; “Part 2: Helene Winer at Pomona” on view
December 3, 2011 to February 19, 2012; and “Part 3: At Pomona” (studio art
faculty and students) on view March 10 to May 13, 2012. The exhibition will be
accompanied by an illustrated timeline, a 386-page publication, and a series of
public programs including a lecture by Thomas Crow on September 17, a reading
by Judy Chicago on October 9, and “Performance at Pomona” on January 21, 2012
with projects by Judy Chicago, James Turrell, and John White.

About the Pomona College Museum of Art

The Pomona College Museum of Art (330 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA) is open
to the public free of charge Tuesday through Friday, from noon to 5 p.m.;
Thursday, from noon to 11 p.m.; and Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. For
more information, call (909) 621-8283 or visit www.pomona.edu/museum.

The Museum collects, preserves, exhibits
and interprets works of art; and houses a substantial permanent collection as
well as serving as a gallery of temporary exhibitions. Important holdings
include the Kress Collection of 15th- and 16th-century Italian panel paintings;
more than 5,000 examples of Pre-Columbian to 20th-century American Indian art
and artifacts, including basketry, ceramics and beadwork; and a large
collection of American and European prints, drawings and photographs, including
works by Francisco de Goya, José Clemente Orozco, and Rico Lebrun.

About Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945 – 1980

Pacific Standard Time is a collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions
across Southern California, which are coming together for six months beginning
October 2011 to tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and
how it became a major new force in the art world. Each institution will make
its own contribution to this grand-scale story of artistic innovation and
social change, told through a multitude of simultaneous exhibitions and
programs. Exploring and celebrating the significance of the crucial
post-World War II years and beyond, Pacific Standard Time encompasses
developments from modernist architecture and design to multi-media
installations; from L.A. Pop to post-minimalism; from the films of the
African-American L.A. Rebellion to the feminist happenings of the Woman’s
Building; from ceramics to Chicano performance art, and from Japanese-American
design to the pioneering work of artists’ collectives.

Initiated through $10 million in grants from the Getty Foundation, Pacific
Standard Time involves cultural institutions of every size and character across
Southern California, from Greater Los Angeles to San Diego and Santa Barbara to
Palm Springs.